In everyday life, continuously doing work on a system is found to heat it up. Rubbing your hands together warms them. Hammering a piece of metal makes it hot. Even without knowing the equations, we learn from experience: driving any system, whether by stirring, pressing, or striking, leads to a rise in the system’s temperature.
The same expectation holds for microscopic quantum systems: when we continuously excite a many-particle system, especially one with strong particle-particle interactions, we expect it to absorb energy and to heat up. But is this always the case, in particular at the quantum level?
No, says an experiment carried out by a team from Hanns-Christoph Nägerl’s group at the Department of Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck. The research has been published in Science.
Researchers used Google’s quantum processor to simulate fundamental physics, offering a new way to study the universe’s basic forces and particles. The fundamental forces that shape our universe are explained through intricate theoretical models. These models are notoriously difficult to study be
The ATLAS collaboration has reported evidence for Higgs bosons decaying into muons and has enhanced the ability to detect Higgs boson decays involving a Z boson and a photon. At the 2025 European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Marseille, France, research on the Hi
The verdict is in. The detection of a cosmic neutrino that smashed into Earth with an unprecedented energy level is not a glitch or an error, but a real detection of a real particle.
In February 2023, a detector called KM3NeT, located deep under the Mediterranean Sea, picked up a signal that seemed to indicate a neutrino with a record-shattering energy of 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV). For reference, the previous record was a mere 10 PeV.
Now, an exhaustive analysis of all the data on and around the event, designated KM3-230213A, not only supports the conclusions that the signal was caused by a 220-PeV neutrino, but adds to the mystery about where the heck in the Universe it came from.
In 1987, Steven Weinberg wrote a cute little paper entitled “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant”. I say cute little paper because it feels minor in comparison to, say, electroweak unification theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Weinberg was foundational in establishing the standard model of particle physics, and represented an enormous leap in understanding how this universe works. But his little 1987 paper, though more obscure, may tell us something about how the multiverse works, and can even be thought of as evidence for the existence of an enormous number of other universes.
Researchers Robert Hazen and Michael Wong have put forward a bold new law of nature — one that could explain how everything in the universe evolves, from atoms, minerals and stars to living cells, ecosystems and even human civilization. At the heart of their theory is the idea that information is as fundamental to the cosmos as mass, energy or charge. Their law revolves around a concept called functional information — a measure of the ratcheting-up of complexity and function in evolving systems over time.
Just as ocean waves shape our shores, ripples in space-time may have once set the Universe on an evolutionary path that led to the cosmos as we see it today.
A new theory suggests gravitational waves – rather than hypothetical particles called inflatons – drove the Universe’s early expansion, and the redistribution of matter therein.
Some scientists now propose that our universe might have been born inside a massive black hole within a larger parent cosmos. In their model, the universe before ours followed the same laws of physics we know today, expanding for billions of years before gravity overcame that outward push. Space began to contract, galaxies moved closer, and the cosmos collapsed toward extreme densities. Instead of ending in a singularity where physics breaks down, quantum effects pushed back against gravity, halting the collapse and triggering a cosmic rebound. That bounce could have launched our own universe’s expansion, making the Big Bang not the true beginning, but a continuation.
This idea draws on the Pauli Exclusion Principle and degeneracy pressure, which in smaller-scale examples prevent white dwarfs and neutron stars from collapsing indefinitely. The same resistance, applied on a universe-wide scale, could stop total collapse inside a black hole. Simulations suggest such a process could occur without invoking exotic new particles or forces. In this framework, the formation of our universe is a purely gravitational event, governed by the physics we already understand, just operating under extreme conditions beyond what we have directly observed.
One striking prediction is that ancient relics from the parent universe could have survived the bounce. These might include primordial black holes or neutron stars that predate our own cosmos. If detected, especially in the early universe, they could serve as evidence that a cosmic bounce occurred. The James Webb Space Telescope’s discovery of unexpectedly massive galaxies soon after the Big Bang could align with this idea, as such galaxies may have formed more easily if early black holes were already present to seed them.
Recent JWST findings on how galaxies spin across the universe may also fit the model. If confirmed, these patterns could point toward a shared origin and support the possibility that we live inside a black hole. While the concept remains controversial, it offers a potential bridge between general relativity and quantum mechanics, challenging the assumption that singularities are inevitable and suggesting that the life cycle of universes may be far more connected than we thought.
Skyrmions are localized, particle-like excitations in materials that retain their structure due to topological constraints (i.e., restrictions arising from properties that remain unchanged under smooth deformations). These quasiparticles, first introduced in high-energy physics and quantum field theory, have since attracted intense interest in condensed matter physics and photonics, owing to their potential as robust carriers for information storage and manipulation.
Researchers at Sun Yat-sen University and Tianjin University recently reported the first experimental realization of single-photon quantum skyrmions (i.e., localized light structures) in a semiconductor cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) system. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open new possibilities for the study of quantum light-matter interactions, while also contributing to the advancement of photonic quantum devices.
“Our work was motivated by the longstanding challenge of realizing topological photonic structures—specifically skyrmions—at the quantum level,” Ying Yu, co-senior author of the paper, told Phys.org.
